The term economy did not have the same meaning throughout Western history. What for many centuries has been understood by economy is far from the liberal meaning of the same term, which we know today.

The historical evolution of the term economy has not been linear over time, but has been becoming something totally different from itself, so much so that the newer concept does not recognize its roots in the old, but in the negation of it. Before Adam Smith gave his famous theory in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the economy had nothing to do with nations. Not with richeness. Not even with the market. To reduce confusion, scholars prefer to use the term oeconomia, referring to the old meaning, leaving the term economy free of ambiguities. The old oeconomia consisted of the government of the house and the administration of its relations and goods, diffused for several centuries and through extensive latitudes, building a western sensibility more or less shared until the late eighteenth century.

The key to accessing the understanding of a cultural universe projected both in the social order of the family and its dependents and in the government of the republic, is provided by the figure of the father of the family. Taking the neighbor's house as a point of departure, the study on the servitude of the house is equally fruitful: there we find the Indians, the blacks, the pardos, the mestizos without luck and the Spaniards without fortune, men and women who built their traces of identity in belonging and in obedience to the patron, who was at the same time the father. In this case, we propose to approach this general mentality, from a specifically local point of departure, San Miguel de Tucumán, a small city in the Southern Andes, located halfway between Potosí and Buenos Aires, between Paraguay and the captaincy of Chile, at the point where the roads meet.

Organization